Amanda Hess’ NYTimes Article Castigating Parents for Bribes Misses BIG Point: We ALL View a Good Education as a Transaction.

Today’s most read article in the NYTimes is Amanda Hess’ article “People Don’t Bribe College Officials to Help Their Kids. They Do It to Help Themselves”. The main point of the article is that parents value the cachet of having their children attend an “elite school” far more than their children. The article focuses on YouTube “star” (and now “victim” of parents bribing her way into college) Olivia Jade as a proxy for a whole group of students whose parents work behind the scenes to get their children admitted to prestigious schools. It seems that Olivia Jade’s broadcasts feature several examples of her demeaning the purpose of higher education and the importance of school altogether. After describing how Olivia Jade has already achieved success of a kind in YouTube’s world, the article concludes with this:

Olivia Jade… is worried that other kids at school are going to take advantage of her. “That’s already my big fear of meeting people at my college — that they are just going to use me,” she says. She seems to see the value of a good education, in exactly the way so many parents see it: as a transaction.

Ms. Hess overlooks one sad reality: it isn’t just parents who see a good education as a “transaction”…. it’s the entire culture we live in. What is schooling but a transaction when the ultimate metric for K-12 education is employability or readiness for college— and college’s ultimate metric is lifetime earnings.